Venue: ESSLLI 2022, Galway, Ireland
Date: 15-19 August 2022

Update:

We will publish a selection of accepted workshop-contributions as a special issue of Topoi. Submit your best work by March 31!

Description:

Imagination has recently entered center stage in semantics and the philosophy of language. While relevant work has focused on diverse aspects of imagination, it has left the particular semantic properties of the verb imagine underexplored. These include the wide selectional flexibility and interesting entailment pattern of imagine, the referential dependence of imagine-complements on experience, and the ability of imagine-reports to encode perspective. Since these properties differ from those of standard responsive predicates, parasitic attitudes, and perspectival expressions, they resist modelling through the familiar semantic tools.  [full workshop proposal]

Aims:

Our workshop aims to bring together work on the semantics of imagination that fills this modelling gap. Its master objective is to identify the particular contribution that imagine and (the different constituents in) its complements make to the complex truth-conditions of imagination reports. To achieve this, we will also solicit papers that contrast the semantics of imagine with that of related verbs, esp. remember, dream, and see.

Workshop Topics (non-exhaustive):

• the selectional flexibility of imagine
• imagine and embedded or concealed questions
• selectional restrictions of imagine (e.g. the markedness of *imagine whether)
• imagining events
• referential dependence of imagine-complements on experience
• semantic inclusion relations between different-category imagine-complements
• monotonicity inferences in the complement of imagine
• differences between imagine and other attitude verbs

Invited Speakers:

• Franz Berto (University of St Andrews)
• Kyle Blumberg (Australian Catholic University)
• Friederike Moltmann (Universite Cote d’Azur)

We invite submission of abstracts for 30-minute oral presentations on any of the above (or related) topics.

Submission details:

• Submitted abstracts must be anonymous
• Abstracts should not be longer than two pages (A4 or US letter size, 12 point font)
• Abstracts must be submitted in pdf format via EasyChair by Thursday 31 March 2022 (23:59 Central European Standard Time): https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=semanticsimagination0

Important dates:

• Submission deadline: 31 March 2022 (23:59 Central European Time)
• Notification of decision: 30 April 2022
• Workshop: 15-19 August 2022

For questions, please contact one of the Workshop Chairs:

• Justin D’Ambrosio (Australian National University —> University of St Andrews)
• Kristina Liefke (Ruhr University Bochum)